6 Tools To Find Out Website Load Speed

Research shows that if your web pages take longer than 5 seconds to load, you lose 50% of your viewers and sales. As a UNIX admin often end users and web developers complain about website loading speed and timings. Usually, there is nothing wrong with my servers or server farm. Fancy java script and images / flash makes site pretty slow. These tools are useful to debug performance problems for sys admins, developers and end users. Here are six tools that can analyzes web pages and tells you why they are slow. Use the following tools to:

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Make your site faster.

Debug site problem, especially client side and server side stuff.

Better user experience.

Improve the web.

#1: Yahoo! YSlow

The Firebug extension for Firefox allows you to debugging, editing, and monitoring of any website’s CSS, HTML, DOM, and JavaScript. YSlow works with the firebug extension:

YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. YSlow grades web page based on one of three predefined ruleset or a user-defined ruleset. It offers suggestions for improving the page’s performance, summarizes the page’s components, displays statistics about the page, and provides tools for performance analysis, including Smush.i and JSLint.

#3: Pagetest (IE specific tool)

This tool only works with MS Internet Explorer. From the project web page:

Pagetest is an open source tool for measuring and analyzing web page performance right from your web browser. AOL developed Pagetest internally to automate load time measurement of its many websites, and it has evolved into a powerful tool for web developers and software engineers in testing their web pages and getting instant feedback. We decided to release it to the grander web development community to further help evolve it into an even more useful – and free – web performance tool.

#4: HTTP Server Benchmarking Tool

ab is a tool for benchmarking your Apache Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server. It is designed to give you an impression of how your current Apache installation performs. This especially shows you how many requests per second your Apache installation is capable of serving. See how to use ab command.

httperf is a tool to measure web server performance. It speaks the HTTP protocol both in its HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 flavors and offers a variety of workload generators.Â Following command causes httperf to create a connection to host www.cyberciti.biz send and receive the reply, close the connection, and then print some performance statistics.$ httperf --hog --server www.cyberciti.biz Sample Outputs:

Following is Like above, except that a total of 100 connections are created and that connections are created at a fixed rate of 10 per second:# httperf --hog --server www.cyberciti.biz --num-conn 100 --ra 10 --timeout 5 Sample Outputs:

#5: Full Page Test

The Full Page Test loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser. The load time of all objects is shown visually with time bars.

#6: UNIX wget or fetch Utility

wget is used to retrieve the file(s) pointed to by the URL(s) on the command line. It can tell you exact time it spent to download your files:$ wget http://www.cyberciti.biz/files/test.pdf $ wget http://www.cyberciti.biz/ Sample Outputs:

Please note that wget does not care about your javascript, css and 3rd party server. This just gives you raw idea and nothing else.

Update#1: Tools For Apple Safari 4 Browser

Apple offers various tools to test your web site:

The Resources pane graphs the order and speed at which website components load over the network. Itâ€™s also the first tool that lets you sort data based on loading parameters such as latency, response time, and duration. You can graph page resources by either size or load time. Clicking a resource in the left column brings up detailed data on the right. For text resources, such as documents and scripts, you see the text source of the file. For image and font resources, you view a graphical preview of the file.

Posted by: Vivek Gite

The author is the creator of nixCraft and a seasoned sysadmin, DevOps engineer, and a trainer for the Linux operating system/Unix shell scripting. Get the latest tutorials on SysAdmin, Linux/Unix and open source topics via RSS/XML feed or weekly email newsletter.

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The best way to optimize the http requests are: 1.Use CSS sprites instead of separate images 2.Use formatted CSS and java-script instead of lengthy file have use-less gaps. 3.Use less no of CSS and JS (as per required) for example on wordpress their are various useless scripts and css called due to several plugins. You can avoid all this by removing the from header. 4.Avoid use of iframes 5.Avoid flash files on the home / landing pages.

Very useful article to measure the page performance. I used the Page Speed and found it very useful. But the tool Google Pagetest (IE specific tool) is not IE8 compatible. We can also keep the images, CSS and javascript in the IIS cache so as to enhance the speed up the page performance.

Useful article, I use webpage test all the time. We use the website accelerator WAX (by aptimize) to automate our frontend optimization – it not only increased the speed of our website by 58% but fixed a caching issue we had on our catelog pages – we had been doing optimization “by hand” for a long while but man does this save us a lot of time – its not free though.

There is as well simonbot wich is performing full page test every day and yslow analysis. The good point is that you can keep the data and graph the evolution of your website performances. Usefull IMHO

Might I suggest you place this form above the comments. It is a little bit annoying to have to scroll through the comments to be able to say my piece. If I want to read the comments, I will scroll down anyway but if someone doesnt want to read the comments, they might not leave you a comment because of having to scroll through them.